Remembering 9/11: Engaging the World with the Gospel of Hope
By David Benke
We formed a circle in the sanctuary that Sunday. Haltingly, then with great emotion, the communion of saints shared stories of escape, of loss, of raw experience from the events of that week. At the end we held hands, locked together in common need, and prayed and prayed and prayed some more prior to approaching the altar for the sustenance and strength of the Lord in His Holy Meal. It was September 16, 2001, at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Brooklyn, New York.
Gilbert Ramirez, the company safety officer on his floor in the first tower, recounted that he had disobeyed the loudspeaker instructions to remain in place, hustling several hundred fellow employees down twenty flights of stairs, where they were met by the sight and sound of those leaping from the top stories to their death as they took their only option to escape the flames. He spoke of the strange sight in the stairwell—firefighters running up the stairs, helmets in hand, their foreheads glistening.
Sherry Mallay told us how she had left the second tower on the morning of September 11, hustling down dozens of flights of stairs and eventually walking miles and miles over the 59th Street Bridge to Queens. She was five months pregnant with twins. Her husband Nick and mother Jasmine Poorandatt flanked her in the sanctuary, expressing their thanks to God for her survival and the relief from their terrible anxiety during the hours she was missing.
Providencia De Jesus Colon, a social worker, recounted walking toward home from downtown New York after the planes hit the Twin Towers. She headed to Brooklyn, entering the pedestrian ramp on the Brooklyn Bridge just as the towers collapsed. The crowd then broke into a run in silence and dread, pushing eastward to Kings County, glancing back over their shoulders like Lot’s wife as the tentacles of smoke and soot from the great crash reached out to engulf them.
I remember those stories and hundreds and hundreds like them word for word to this day, twenty years later. I feel the hands on either side of me in prayer; I hear the cries of the faithful before the throne of grace; I taste the tears mingled with the Body and Blood of Christ in the Sacrament as though this were still September 16, 2001.
Time for a Reset
“Never Forget: 9/11/2001” emblazons manifold bumper stickers here in New York. Never forget? Impossible to forget; always remembered. And always instructive of the Church’s vocation, and her shepherds’ and leaders’, and mine. On August 1, 2001, I suffered a heart attack while at the Missouri Synod’s National Youth Gathering in New Orleans. The cardiologist’s instructions to me upon return to New York were to chill out and take my medicine, easing up for at least the next six months. No problem; time for a reset.
On September 8, 2001, I flew out to St. Louis for the service of installation and inauguration of a great friend and colleague, Dr. Gerald B. Kieschnick, as president of the LCMS. A time to celebrate, but—my vocation had already been reset a few years earlier by determining to do “double duty” and assume a regular parish call back in my former church, St. Peter’s in Brooklyn, as a means to remain grounded in a local altar, font, pulpit, and communion of saints while serving a hundred more. So I flew back for Sunday worship in Brooklyn on September 9, the better to prepare for a staff meeting at my wider church setting—the Atlantic District—on the campus of Concordia College, Bronxville that Tuesday—September 11.
My task for that meeting was to come up with a new theme for our wider church work together and to redistribute staff duties around my cardiologist’s advice. Time for a reset. I wrote it up, headed over the bridge from Queens to Westchester County, and at 8:30 a.m., printed up the new directive: “Engaging the World with the Gospel of Hope.”
As I was getting ready to head to the meeting, the phone rang around 8:50 a.m. It was one of our district pastors, Bill Wrede, informing me that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. “A little plane?” I asked. “No,” he said, “it was a big plane. I feel I should go and bring some prayer support to what’s going on.” I blessed him and sent him in. By mid-morning he was anointing the heads of Christian firefighters with oil, marking them with the sign of the cross as they headed into buildings from which many would never return, their foreheads glistening as they headed up the stairways of those towers.
Within a half hour of Bill’s phone call, our Atlantic District staff sat together in astonishment. We had to leave. We had been attacked on our home ground! I handed them the paper with the new theme—“We’ve been engaged by evil, by terror,” I remember saying. “Our lives are not going to be the same. But what we’re going to do is exactly the same—we’re going to engage the world with the Gospel of hope. Godspeed.” We prayed and scattered. No time for a vocational reset!
I headed back across the bridge to Queens and then to Brooklyn, where St. Peter’s Pre-School was in pandemonium as over a hundred parents scrambled to pick up their children. Those coming from Manhattan were covered in gray ash, “like snowmen,” as the kids saw it. Carmen Ramirez phoned the office overwhelmed with anxiety; her son Richard hadn’t phoned, and the towers had collapsed—was he buried beneath them? Not until that evening would she know that he was safe. Every other word, it seemed, was a prayer for someone to be safe, for someone to call and say they were alive.
As phone service sputtered through the day, my wife Judy and I spoke. She had been headed to upper Manhattan for a school consultation, when she noticed a plane flying southward down the Hudson River. “That’s not right,” she thought. She ended up with a daylong journey back to Queens, weaving around problematic travel areas as all the various bridges and tunnels that connect New Yorkers to their islands were shut down to traffic in fear of more terror and violence.
I told her about my conversation with Stephen Paul Bouman, the bishop of the ELCA’s Metro New York Synod. We had just committed to sharing some office space at the Metro Synod headquarters to better coordinate our Lutheran social ministry outreach. Steve and I had arrived in Queens together in the summer of 1973, and had shared holidays and special events with our families. We were transplanted New Yorkers with a long history of collaboration. On September 11, we divvied up responsibilities for the day, Steve taking the northern areas and I the southern regions around the city in our mission of communication and visitation. Our strong relationship in Gospel witness proved to be the visible sign of Lutheran presence and unity of purpose in the months and years afterward. It was an amazing blessing!
Later in the afternoon I headed out from St. Peter’s in far eastern Brooklyn to Lutheran Medical Center at the western edge of the borough. Lutheran was one of New York’s primary triage centers in response to disaster, so the thought was that many of the injured from lower Manhattan would be brought there. At the hospital, the despair on the faces of the emergency room staff told the story—triage was needed for only a few. Those on the site of the towers didn’t have a chance. They were dead, buried or incinerated amidst the rubble. Prayers then were for those primary caregivers themselves, who intuited exactly the deadly nature of the events of the day. That was September 11, 2001.
It’s ok to Pray
As the lockdown went into full force during the week that followed, we contacted other LCMS congregants and pastors; leaders from city agencies; ecumenical church authorities; politicians; and most of all, we made contact with people on the street, who would literally drop to their knees on the sidewalk and request prayer. We held a prayer service on Wednesday, September 12 in the evening at St. Peter’s, neighborhood folks just streaming in as soon as they heard we would be praying.
Dr. Calvin Butts, President of the New York City Council of Churches, convened a service of prayer and song at his congregation, Abyssinian Baptist in Harlem, on Thursday evening, September 13. The direction of the wind was from south to north, so the smoke from the Twin Towers was the incense in that magnificent building as we began. My contribution was to pray a hymn from my childhood:
Thee will I love, my Strength, my Tower,
Thee will I love, my hope, my joy,
Thee will I love with all my power,
With ardor time shall ne’er destroy;
Thee will I love, O Light Divine,
So long as life is mine.
Bishop Bouman and I participated together at that service in Harlem. The next morning at the behest of Mayor Giuliani, we huddled with other religious and political leaders at the rectory of St. Patrick’s Cathedral to plan a prayer service for the city, to pray for peace in a time of profound dread and inter-religious tension.
At lunch, we resolved to work in tandem and in unison on the local and national levels of Lutheran response to the terror attacks. We had heard immediately from Missouri Synod Human Care coordinator Elaine Richter and the indomitable ELCA Disaster Response coordinator Gil Furst. Their collaborative partnership and determination helped us to give birth within ten days of September 11 to Lutheran Disaster Response of New York. Very quickly we brought aboard the durable force of nature John Scibilia as our executive director. Twenty-five million dollars flowed through LDRNY during its eight-year history. Thanks to John and his staff, including Wendy Healey, LDRNY was the organization most trusted by the Victims’ Families Association. It led, among other results, to the Unmet Needs Roundtable, and New York Disaster Interfaith Services (NYDIS) which continues to this day. Steve and I signed all the checks from beginning to end.
Our national Lutheran leaders determined to visit New York the week after September 11. ELCA Bishop Anderson and just-installed LCMS President Kieschnick flew out to be with us. The day began with a trip to Ground Zero under the direction of FBI Chaplain and great friend Steve Unger. We approached elite rescue team members from around the country relentlessly digging to find any survivors. To a person, these heroes dropped to their knees and requested prayer for their strength and those they might find in the burning rubble. We were all covered in the same dust—ash mingled with human remains—that blanketed lower Manhattan in those days.
We then drove back to midtown and entered the sanctuary of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church for two inter-Lutheran services of Word, song, and prayer. It was a day of profound spiritual depth. The faithful were united. The faithful were fed with God’s Word. The balm of healing in Christ restored us. As the national leaders left, we got news that the mayor’s prayer service was going to be held at Yankee Stadium. Late on Thursday, September 20, I received a phone call from John Hiemstra, the NYC Council of Churches executive, asking if I would agree to be among those delivering a prayer on Sunday, September 23. I told him I’d get back to him.
The next morning, I dialed President Kieschnick, told him about the request, and asked for his approval. He said, “Dave, if there is no restriction on your Christian witness, go for it.” So that Sunday, I offered a one-minute prayer at Yankee Stadium. Judy was there, along with some of our parishioners from Brooklyn. Thousands of those in the stands waved photos of their lost or missing loved ones, weeping in prayer through their pain for the strength to go on. Singers and accompanists wept as they performed.
Introduced by Dr. Butts, I prayed as follows:
Oh, we're stronger now than we were an hour ago. And you know, my sisters and brothers, we're not nearly as strong as we're going to be. And the strength we have is the power of love. And the power of love you have received is from God, for God is love. So take the hand of one next to you now and join me in prayer on this "field of dreams" turned into God's house of prayer:
O Lord our God, we're leaning on You today. You are our Tower of Strength, and we're leaning on You. You are our Mighty Fortress, our God who is a Rock; in You do we stand. Those of us who bear the name of Christ know that You stood so tall when You stooped down to send a Son through death and life to bring us back together, and we lean on You today.
O Tower of Strength, be with those who mourn the loss of loved ones; bring them closer to us day by day.
O Heavenly Father, we pray at this time that You might extend Jacob's ladder for those who ascended the stairways to save us, as others escaped the fire and flames.
O Tower of Strength, open innocent and victimized hearts to the sacrifice of the Innocent One; pour Your consolation upon the traumatized, especially our children.
O Heavenly Father, un-bind, un-fear, un-scorch, un-sear our souls; renew us in Your free Spirit.
We're leaning on You, our Tower of Strength. We find our refuge in the shadow of Your shelter.
Lead us from this place—strong—to bring forth the power of Your love wherever we are. In the precious name of Jesus. Amen.
Within two months, I was brought up on charges of heresy for “unionism and syncretism” by twenty-one individuals and congregations in the Missouri Synod. I was convicted of the charges and suspended from the Missouri Synod clergy roster on June 25, 2002. I appealed that decision.
Six months later, the appeal hearing was conducted at a hotel alongside the tarmac at the Newark Airport in New Jersey. From the window of our meeting room the eastern horizon framed lower Manhattan and what was left of its skyline, torn apart by the destruction of the towers. My final words to the panelists were to point them toward that battered skyline. “If,” I began, “you choose to lift my suspension, I will be there, in New York. That is the call of God on my heart.” “If,” I concluded, “you choose to uphold my suspension and remove me from the clergy roster, I will be there, in New York. Because that is the call of God on my heart.” No vocational reset necessary.
In May 2003, my appeal was upheld and the suspension lifted. Carried along on a sea of prayers throughout, I received incredible assistance and support throughout from Judy, from my family, from attorney and friend Howard Capell, theologian Don Matzat, Judge Eugene Schnelz, District First Vice-President Charles Froehlich, Pastor Deric Taylor, Andrea Masley, Dr. Ken Doka, the people of God at St. Peter’s, the people and pastors of the Atlantic District, and a nationwide web of support, all under the banner “It’s ok to Pray.” T-shirts are still available!
Memorials and Ministries
Meanwhile, LDRNY brought hope to thousands of people in metropolitan New York. The head of FEMA in New York, Ken Curtin, called us the “all-time hip-hop-happening of disaster response.” Our congregations came together in prayer frequently. We held one another up through many funerals—43 students in Lutheran schools lost a parent on September 11, dozens and dozens of congregants’ lives were lost, including firefighters and police. Lutheran Ron Bucca, the FDNY Fire Marshal for zip code 10010—the World Trade Center—was memorialized at Concordia College, Bronxville. Thousands were given assistance via funding from LDRNY through the Lutheran Counseling Center in the next years; LDRNY initiated substantial respite programs for all our workers and parishioners caught in the vortex of fear and caregiving; school children and church school children were presented with special curricula opening channels to Christ’s peace through the Word. LDRNY sponsored the testimonies before Congress of those affected by protecting and serving at Ground Zero, which led to the Zadroga Act, a 2010 law that provides health monitoring and assistance to the first responders, volunteers, and survivors of the September 11 attacks.
During my “time-out” under suspension, I served as the interim CEO of Lutheran Social Services of New York, which at the time was located two blocks from Ground Zero. An engine from the plane that struck the second tower had spun off and landed on the roof of the building above the CEO offices on September 11. We had seen the engine surrounded by crime scene tape during our tour on September 19. One year later, I sat in that office and prayed with the staff, who were spectacular in their commitment to the work at hand.
Shortly thereafter, in October 2002, the Atlantic District held a service of prayer and song called Grace at Ground Zero with a thousand in attendance. We moved ahead as pilgrims and sojourners following the Way on the journey to our destiny; under suspension, I was an attendee, not the host, one of those in need of maximum support from the fellowship Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.
Twenty years later, Sherry Mallay’s twin sons have graduated from high school. Gilbert Ramirez is father to twin daughters. The Atlantic District of the Missouri Synod, to commemorate public engagement with the Gospel, initiated the Witness in the Public Square Luncheon which has raised many millions of dollars for missions. The Tribute Center in downtown Manhattan is the Victims’ Family Association legacy to those who died. I’m still preaching at St. Peter’s in Brooklyn.
There is no vocational reset for the baptized. We are called day in and day out to engage the world with the Gospel of hope!
Pr. David Benke was president of the Atlantic District, LCMS, on September 11, 2001.
Note
This article will be published in the Fall 2022 print version of Lutheran Forum.
